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User blog:RRabbit42/Constant Vigilance on article comments
One of the features that Wikia has is Article Comments. They appear at the bottom of each article. It lets people participate who might otherwise not if they feel they have to formally discuss things on a separate Talk page. Another wikia I'm a part of decided not to have them because it is about a children's show and typically you don't get a lot of high quality comments from very young kids. Not that they can't do that (the show itself keeps in mind that children are smarter than many people think) and we weren't expecting college-level thoughts and ideas, but realized we probably wouldn't get much that actually helped improve the page. We also wanted to avoid a situation that happened on other wikias where we could see that most of the activity was article comments and not actually editing the articles. They spent so much time talking instead of doing. Despite the possibility the same thing could happen here, I want to enable the Article Comments. The members of this community will typically be a little older, so in theory there should be more substance to the comments that are left. I see that already in the comments being left for each comic on the Broodhollow website. But I also see that spam has been infesting the comments there for a couple of months now. Kris has had to shut down the official wikis he hosted for Broodhollow and Starslip because they got drowned by spam. We need to make sure the same thing doesn't happen here. Wikia has added a lot of anti-spam measures to their system. The spam I have seen all seems to be human-generated instead of being done by a bot. It's a little more noticable in the past few weeks than it has been previously, but because it's by a human, it's not getting very far before it's stopped. To help prevent spam from taking root here, we will need to check each article comment. We don't want to delete the ones that are not great or don't convey a profound thought. Just the ones we can identify as spam. Spam is constantly changing because people figure out new ways to get around what prevents them from spamming. But there is one easy way to tell if something is spam. If you read a comment that is oddly-phrased like it is written in Engrish or looks like it was translated by a website like Google's Translate, highlight that phrase and do a search for it on Google or Yahoo and wrap it in quotes to make it an exact phrase. Example: If you saw someone had written "the puppy is hello stop", put "the puppy is hello stop" into the search engine with the quotation marks. If you get more than three exact matches, it's probably spam. If you find spam, click on "Reply" to that comment and put in the following: . This will mark that comment to be deleted. Note for administrators: due to how article comments work, deleting them is more like hiding them. To completely delete one, you have to edit the second comment to erase the Delete template, then you can delete the first comment. If you don't do this, the second article comment still shows up in the "What links here" report for the Delete template. You would have to undelete the comment, remove the Delete template, save it, then re-delete that comment in order to separate it from the "What links here" report. Since article comments replace Talk pages, we will need a place to discuss improvements to articles. Trying to add them as an article comment means they are likely to get lost. This will likely be done by adding a "click here to suggest changes" link inside the header. Whether that goes to a single page where changes to anything in a particular book are discussed, or whether it goes to an individual page specific to that comic, I haven't figured out yet. Category:Community News Category:Blog posts